Thursday, November 6, 2014

Still more interesting Political News and Conservative Comment

Update

Election Day, November 7, 1972

Friday, November 7, will be exactly 42 years since I was
elected to the Massachusetts Senate. Below is the blub on election night from
my first book, The Good Bits: The
Marines, the Massachusetts
Senate and Managing Associations

I came back from Vietnam convinced the war—though
just—was screwed up by the damn politicians. Being young and naïve, I decided
to abandon my thoughts of a Marine Corps career, get out, go to college, and go
into politics to “fix things.” So I left the Corps in 1968 and entered college.

By the time I graduated from the University of Massachusetts
in June of 1972, I was already deep into a campaign for the Massachusetts State
Senate against an incumbent Democrat, Senator Joe Ward. The Third Worcester
District was about 4 to 1 Democratic, having last elected a Republican in 1938.
Joe was considered the most powerful politician to ever come from our part of
the state. He hadn’t had an opponent in the last three elections. Before
serving five terms in the Senate, he’d been Secretary of State and lost a close
election to John Volpe for Governor in 1960. He was a successful lawyer with
the support of the local establishment. And 1972, the McGovern year, wasn’t a
good one for Republicans in Massachusetts.

I was a 26-year-old kid from New Jersey, who had only lived in the
district the four years I was in college, though it was my voting address while
I was in the Marines. Seemed like a fair fight.

When the polls closed on election night, the best prediction
we heard on the radio was that I had run a good campaign and would probably
only get beat about 2 to 1.

At two in the morning, we were about 2,000 votes down. Joe
went on the radio and thanked his constituents for re-electing him. His
supporters drove by my house blasting their horns. My supporters said, “good campaign”
and went home to bed—except for the high school and college kids who had worked
so hard.

Then Lunenburg, where I lived, came in and gave me a
1,000-vote plurality. The Democratic stronghold of Clinton, where we were predicted to lose by
2,000 votes, came in and I had carried the town by 54 votes. Shaking 6,000
hands there on Election Day—while almost crippling my arm—had paid off.

The next four precincts to come in gave me pluralities. The
Town of Westminster
came in about 4:30 am, giving me a 300-vote victory, and leaving me 147 votes
behind, with one town—Shirley—left to report out of the 13 cities and towns in
the district.

In those days, everything was paper ballots, slow counting,
but thankfully no machines to “fix.” Shirley was told the Senate race depended
on them, so they counted three times.

At 6:30 am, the call came in from Shirley. They read the
numbers; I repeated them out loud. We all did the math. Then the cheers
erupted. I had carried Shirley by 156 votes, upsetting an incumbent state
senator by nine votes—out of over 60,000 votes cast.

*****

Actually, I won the first election by 126 votes, once all
the recounts were over. This was a good thing, as the Democrats in the Senate
would have probably appointed a committee to investigate the election, found
ten challenged Hall votes to throw out, and seated Senator Ward in my place. In
fact, a Democratic leader later told me that was the plan. Not without
precedent—in my district, the Republicans did just that to the Democratic challenger
back in 1938. But I wasn’t eager to be the victim of poetic justice for
something that happened before I was born. Luckily, the leadership decided 126
were too many votes to safely throw out—bad PR with voters who like to think
they live in a democracy. Senator Ward asked the Senate to seat him any way,
and considered a court challenge. It was December—a month after the
election—before I was sure I’d be seated.

Seeing the various way voters could screw up paper ballots
was enlightening. People wrote messages to their government on them. People
voted for cartoon characters. People voted for themselves. All of these ballots
were challenged as having “identifying marks.” The 126-vote margin meant the
challenges ended up being moot, as the election didn’t go to court.

It was interesting to note the number of folks who voted for
either right or left wing fringe candidates, who also voted for me for state
senator. Since there was hardly philosophical agreement across that spectrum, I
assume these were anti-incumbent votes.

In my town of Lunenburg,
there was one fellow noted for being a good citizen. He showed up for every
election—and wrote himself in for every office. At least, it was assumed that
the he was the one writing himself in, and not his wife or neighbor.

In 1972, he again voted, and again wrote himself in for
every office. Except for state senator, where he broke ranks and voted for me.
I was proud of getting his vote away from himself.

In fact, I think if only the kooky votes had counted, I’d have
won in a landslide.

(In my recount in 1972, the big gain on my 9-vote margin was
a block of 50 votes in Fitchburg
that had been recorded as 39 for Ward, 11 for me. It was the other way around
when we had observers, giving me a net gain of 58 votes. Maybe an accident, but
as almost always it was an error that benefited the Democrat in a
Democrat-controlled city. ~Bob)

Excerpt: There are really two Democratic parties. One is the
old corrupt party of thieves and crooks. Its politicians, black and white, are
the products of political machines. They believe in absolutely nothing. They
can go from being Dixiecrats to crying racism, from running on family values to
pushing gay marriage and the War on Women. They will say absolutely anything to
get elected.

Excerpt: That would give the party control of 67 chambers,
five more than their previous record in the modern era, set after special
elections in 2011 and 2012. It also would give Republicans total control of 24
states, in which they hold the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the
state legislature (Nebraska’s
unicameral legislature is technically nonpartisan, but in practice Republicans
control the chamber by a wide margin). Democrats, by contrast, are likely to
control all three legs of the governing stool in only six states. (When I was
one of 40 Massachusetts State Senators, we usually had seven Republicans. Once
up to 8, once down to 6. Must be nice. ~Bob)

Worth Reading:
Obama Isn't Listening to Voters He Claims to
Hear. "I hear you," the president says. But he doesn't. By Ron Fournier

Excerpt: Shellacked and thumped by an angry electorate, President Obama
declared to every American who voted in Tuesday's elections—and to those who've
checked out of the political process—"I hear you." And then he
ignored them. From all appearances Wednesday, the president won't change—not
his policies, not his style, not his staff, not nothing. (No surprise
here. ~Bob)

Excerpt: Well, enough Americans finally woke up, and enough
other Americans stayed away, that we finally were able to give Democrats the
sort of smackdown they have so richly deserved for so long. (No. First, you
don't have the votes in the senate to convict. Second, an impeachment effort would
mobilize Democrats, especially blacks, to defeat Republicans. And it would help
Obama recover as it helped Clinton
recover. [I said that was dumb at the time.] But suppose you succeeded? There
would be riots, hundreds of deaths and tens of millions of dollars in damage in
the cities. All this would help incumbent Biden going into the 2016 election
with a mobilized party behind him, all the folks you say "stayed
away" would turn out to vote, and you would very likely get President
Biden for four years. Remember that Gore got more votes than Bush in 2000, even
as a non-incumbent. We cannot risk that disaster. ~Bob)

Excerpt: If President Obama suffered a
"shellacking" in the 2010 elections, then what he endured Tuesday
night was nothing short of a vicious gangland beat down the likes of which have
rarely been seen before in the history of electoral politics. This, of course,
is a wonderful and well-deserved outcome. But beware: America now
enters the two most dangerous years of her existence — or certainly the most
dangerous since the Great Depression and possibly going all the way back to the
Civil War.

Excerpt: Less than two months after their most joyous moment
together, the relationship between the Obama White House and Senate Democrats
went off track and has never recovered. Instead of basking in the victory glow
of President Obama’s impressive 2012 reelection and an improbable two-seat gain
for Democrats, they found themselves at the edge of the now infamous “fiscal
cliff.” (Maybe they should have looked beyond skin color when selecting a
nominee. ~Bob)

Excerpt: A West
VirginiaUniversity
freshman who did most of her campaigning out of her dorm room became the youngest state
lawmaker in the nation Tuesday. Republican Saira Blair, a fiscally
conservative 18-year-old, will represent a small district in West
Virginia’s eastern panhandle, about 1½ hours outside Washington, D.C.,
after defeating her Democratic opponent 63% to 30%, according to the Associated
Press. (I was an ancient 26 when first elected. And not near as good looking. ~Bob)

Excerpt: President Obama, after his party suffered bruising
midterm defeats in races that Republicans deemed a referendum on his policies,
vowed anew Wednesday to work across the aisle in his final two years in office
– while at the same time, vowing to press ahead with controversial executive
action on immigration.

Excerpt: Last year, fresh from a presidential reelection
campaign in which it was hailed for its 21st-century tactics and organizing
prowess, a group of Obama for America
veterans descended on Texas
with the goal of turning the state purple. They launched a new group,
Battleground Texas,
raised millions from wealthy donors, and teamed up with a rising Democratic
star running for statewide office. What happened next will...probably not shock
you. In the first test-drive for Battleground Texas, Democrats got trounced, losing every
statewide race for the 16th consecutive election.

Excerpt: Judicial Watch announced today that the Internal
Revenue Service (IRS) admitted to the court that it failed to search any of the
IRS standard computer systems for the “missing” emails of Lois Lerner and other
IRS officials. The admission appears in an IRS
legal brief opposing the Judicial Watch request that
a federal court judge allow discovery into how “lost and/or destroyed” IRS
records relating to the targeting of conservative groups may be retrieved. (If
you're the guy who dumped the body off the bridge, you don't have to look for
it to know where it is. ~Bob)

Excerpt: “For Republicans, what counts as victory?” I asked
in my
pre-election post, and now we have an answer: This counts.
Control of the Senate with room to spare, easy victories in what were supposed
to be tight purple-state races and even easier victories in red states, an
unexpected nailbiter in Virginia and an upset win in North Carolina, Rick Scott
and Scott Walker re-elected, gubernatorial wins all over the map in deep blue
states, a historically-large House majority … it’s a wave, it’s a thumping,
it’s whatever metaphor you favor to describe a major repudiation of the
president and his party.

Excerpt: Tuesday night's victory for the Republicans wasn't
just a blow to President Barack Obama - it was also a knock on Hillary Clinton,
who campaigned for almost all of the candidates who lost Democratic US Senate
seats on Tuesday.

Excerpt: The stunning upset that wasn’t two decades ago may
have been an early indicator of what was yet to come: On Tuesday, Hogan
pulled off perhaps the most surprising victory of the 2014 cycle, a year
in which there were plenty. Although he served as a cabinet secretary in the
administration of former Maryland
governor Bob Ehrlich, the 58-year-old businessman has never held elected office.
And, though not a single
public poll had showed him ahead, on Tuesday Hogan defeated Maryland’s lieutenant
governor, Anthony Brown, by five points.

Excerpt: The Duke of Wellington said of his close-run
victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo that the French “came on in the
same old way, and we sent them back in the same old way.” Something like that
happened to the Democrats in Tuesday’s midterm elections, as they lost the
Senate, a few more seats in the House, and additional governorships. They came
on with the same old strategy, but this time they went down with it.

In 2012, voters from 18 to 29 made up 20 percent of the
electorate in Colorado.
That year, Colorado
voters legalized marijuana through a popular initiative. In 2014, voters from 18 to 29 made up 14 percent of the
electorate in Colorado.
Hm. Once you legalize marijuana, the youth vote drops. Perhaps I have been
completely off base in my wariness about legalizing weed. Heck, give it
away for free on college campuses in early November!

Excerpt: Overall, young voters were more likely to show up
at the polls and more likely to cast their ballots for Republicans than they
were in 2010. With the exception of Arkansas, where the GOP nominated a
likeable 37 year-old candidate, the youngest voters within our demographic
(18-24) were more likely to vote Republican than the older ones (25-29). This
confirms a trend we observed in 2012 and 2013: first-time voters who supported
Barack Obama in 2008 have been somewhat loyal to his party, while their younger
siblings and those who came of voting age during the Obama presidency have
largely turned away from Democrats in the face of crippling student loan debt
and the highest sustained youth unemployment levels since World War II.

Excerpt: The actual truth is that Obama simply doesn't
do his job, because he is lazy, and he refuses to do the non-glamorous,
non-"fun" parts of his job such as compromising, horsetrading, or
working out the details, because he is a committed die-hard ideologue who
also suffers from an intense Messianic complex in which he can only be the
conquering hero. And also, he seems to be lethargic because he is
psychologically a depressive, whose mood is only elevated by hero worship --
something he hasn't gotten in a while, because he's a miserable failure.

Excerpt: There were 36 U.S. Senate races this year, and as
usual most of them weren’t close and weren’t polled much, if at all. We pride
ourselves on polling every race at least once, although we generally looked at
ones that weren’t expected to be close only once or twice at most. That was a
mistake in the case of Virginia
where a popular Democratic incumbent ended up winning by less than a point. But
we clearly saw the Republican wave coming, although the margins in the races in
some cases proved to be bigger than some of our final polls projected. To see a
comparison of our numbers to the final outcomes in all the Senate races, click here. Also included for comparison is the Real Clear
Politics average of all the most recent polls, not just ours, in each
race.

Excerpt: “I hear you,” President Obama said to the voters
who gave Democrats an electoral drubbing in Tuesday’s midterm elections. But
their message went in one presidential ear and out the other. The Republican
victory was a political earthquake, giving the opposition party control of the
Senate, expanding its House majority to a level not seen in generations and
burying Democratic gubernatorial candidates. (because it's Bush's fault. Or the
Koch brothers. Or maybe Global Warming. Certainly not Obama's. ~Bob)

Worth Reading:
The first steps Republicans should take. By George F. Will

Excerpt: Unlike the dog that chased the car until, to its
consternation, he caught it, Republicans know what to do with what they have
caught. Having completed their capture of control of the legislative branch, they should
start with the following six measures concerning practical governance and
constitutional equilibrium:

Excerpt: "I’m harassed by white men, black men,
Latino men. Not a day goes by when I don’t experience this.” (All the harassers
in the video that I could see were black. HuffPo doesn't mention that. ~Bob)

Excerpt: As a rule, the most interesting coverage of an
election night is always the losing side’s coverage. Last night, MSNBC’s anchors,
most of whom would concede they are more ideologically friendly toward
Democrats than Republicans, lost and lost big.

"The principle of the Constitution is that of a
separation of legislative, Executive and Judiciary functions, except in cases
specified. If this principle be not expressed in direct terms, it is clearly
the spirit of the Constitution, and it ought to be so commented and acted on by
every friend of free government." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to James
Madison, 1797

Excerpt: The Republican rout Tuesday helped the GOP regain
ground among Hispanic voters, a bloc that both parties consider crucial for the
2016 presidential race but that not long ago seemed an increasingly stalwart
Democratic constituency. In Florida and Colorado, two states
likely to be major battlegrounds for the White House, GOP candidates won
competitive races for governor and Senate, respectively, after aggressive outreach
campaigns that included Spanish-language ads.

Excerpt: A national chorus of rage is rising over the
"Monsanto Protection Act," a provision of the HR 933 spending bill
that was passed by Congress this month and signed into law Tuesday by
President Barack Obama.

Dear Republicans: No One Elected You to Work with
Democrats. By Leon H. Wolf

But we must always maintain the posture of being willing to
work with anyone to get beneficial things done for the country. Otherwise, you
give the left media the ammo to smear the GOP with the low-info voters. Not to
worry--the left won't compromise at all. ~Bob

Walker Win Should
Offer Blueprint for GOP. Thrice-elected governor enters second term leading
political transformation of Wis.
By Brian Sikma

Excerpt: Mounting the stage last night at his victory rally
in a large pavilion at Wisconsin’s StateFairPark, Gov. Scott Walker
delivered a speech unlike any other he’s given in a moment of victory.
References to Wisconsin were replaced by references to America, comments about
state political foes were replaced by references to special interests in
Washington, D.C. and aside from a couple of mentions of Wisconsin unity, much
was said about the American dream and the national future. If there was any
doubt that Walker
is looking for national prime time, it was wiped away last night. His resume is
impressive for a governor just wrapping up his first term.

Excerpt: If progressives like Ruth Conniff think Walker only
won among an "angry group" of men and that they need to double down
on the 'War on Women' to close the gap, more power to them. Whatever helps them
sleep at night. The truth is, Walker
did win overwhelmingly among men (60/39). But he also held his own among
women. Walker
earned 94% of the vote among Republican women and 46% of the vote among
independent women according to election day
exit polls. And among married women, Walker
earned 48% to Burke's 51%. (I know many women who voted for Walker; they were angry too. How about the
Democrat gender gap with men? Why is that not a problem? ~Bob)

Excerpt: This state’s new voter identification law — widely
considered the most stringent in the nation — received its first major test in
Tuesday’s midterm elections amid fears that hundreds of thousands of voters,
including many Hispanics and African-Americans, would be prevented from voting.
One federal judge even likened the situation to the state’s “shameful history”
of poll taxes. But early indications suggest that while some voters ran into
roadblocks, the effects were perhaps less dire than the law's harshest critics
predicted. A hotline for voter questions, set up by Election Protection, a
nonpartisan organization, fielded nearly 500 phone calls from Texans who did
not have at least one of the seven approved forms of ID needed to vote or who
were confused about the requirements. (500? What happened to the claimed
600,000 Texans who were too incompetent to get IDs. This from Al
Jazeera which I assume is not a supporter of Voter ID. ~Bob)

Race Card News

Worth Reading:
(Senator)Tim Scott: People Are Voting Based on Values, Not Race

Excerpt: Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) argued that voters “are
aligning their votes with their values and they’re voting for candidates who
are simply not their own complexion” in an interview broadcast on Wednesday’s
“OutFront” on CNN. Scott talked about his experience last night becoming the
first African-American elected to the US Senate since Reconstruction, saying
“I'm blessed to have a grandfather that is 94 years old. He's seen a different America growing
up than I have, and here is a fella who was a youngster picking cotton and in
his lifetime he's seen his grandson get elected to Congress and now the Senate.
(First from the South. My friend and political mentor, Sen. Edward Brooke,
R-MA, was the first. The racist liberal Democrats took him out in 1976, based
on charges proved unfounded AFTER the election. And Brooke was a liberal
Republican. Scott got 63% of the vote in "racist" SC, which also
reelected their Asian governor. ~Bob)

Excerpt: Finally, there are two more races that spring to
mind, in South Carolina and Utah. Tim Scott, a black Republican, won the
Senate seat in South Carolina, and Mia Love, a
black woman Republican, won a House seat in Utah. Possibly it is time for the Democrats
to desist from their vulgar practice of pitching campaigns towards supposed
women's issues and the inflammatory issue of race. Those issues have grown
tiresome. Who else besides a Democratic candidate would think that condoms and
race are anything but passe issues today? Birth control lost its ability to
shock us about 50 years ago, and certainly by this election it has lost its
ability to turn out large numbers of angry women. As for playing the race card,
it should have lost its ability to fire up the Democratic base after the 2008
election, when the American people elected their first black president. Then, many
voters were glad to vote for Barack Obama, if for no other reason, to put the
issue of racial prejudice behind us. What other Western power had elected a
black man to such an exalted office?

Excerpt: One underappreciated aspect of the last four years
is that the GOP-controlled House of Representatives passed dozens of health care-related
bills that were popular with the public. But Sen. Harry Reid (D., Nev.), the
Senate Majority Leader, blocked those bills from coming to a vote, in order to
prevent embarrassing Democratic defections. Under a Republican Senate, a number
of those bills will now get to the President’s desk, and there’s a number that
he may sign. Up until now, much of the conversation in the media and on Capitol
Hill has centered on measures favored by health industry lobbyists, such as a
repeal of Obamacare’s premium-increasing
tax on medical devices.

Excerpt: To be sure, it isn’t fair to attribute all of the
turnover in the chamber to Obamacare. Many senators voted for Obamacare and
lost re-election battles in which they were hit hard for their support for the
law, and other Democrats were forced to retire because they had no hope of
getting re-elected given their support for the law. But in some cases — such as
John Kerry leaving his seat to become secretary of state, or Robert Byrd
passing away — Obamacare clearly had nothing to do with it.

Excerpt: Repeal the SGR formula. Congress created the
Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula in 1997, which automatically cuts
Medicare's payments to doctors each year. However, Congress has also overridden
the cuts every year since 2003. The formula is flawed, and continuous cuts to
doctors will only reduce access to care for those in the government health care
program. Moffit says a new Congress must replace the SGR without forcing
taxpayers to pick up the tab. Tackling Medicare cuts. Obamacare cuts Medicare
payments in order to create $716 billion in alleged savings; however, those
cuts only make it more difficult to meet health care providers' costs. The CMS
Actuary has shown that, due to the cuts, half of all hospitals and two-thirds
of skilled nursing facilities will have negative total facility margins by
2040, and providers will have to cut back services, withdraw from Medicare
entirely or shift costs to private payers. One-third of seniors are enrolled in
Medicare Advantage, a system of competing health care plans. Seniors are highly
satisfied with these plans, yet the administration targeted the program for
cuts. Moffit says the program should be protected, and the new Congress should
put more free-market reforms into the program.

Undocumented Democrat News

Obama: If The GOP
Passes An Immigration Bill, The Executive Actions That I Take Go Away. By Debra
Heine

Excerpt: Most of the people the Border Patrol stopped from
sneaking into the country last year were from countries other than Mexico,
according to agency statistics, a shift that might have provided fodder for
politicians leading up to Tuesday’s election. But they didn’t get much of a
chance. The Border Patrol’s annual statistics were posted on the U.S. Customs
and Border Protection Web site for about five hours on Oct. 10, then taken
down. Now some are questioning whether that decision was an example of the
Obama administration playing politics with public information. (Ya think? ~Bob)

Excerpt: Jesús Antonio Gamboa Urías, a Mexican journalist
who edited the online news site Nueva Prensa, was found dead a week after being
abducted. His body, riddled with gunshots, was found in a village near the city
of Los Mochis, in the north-western state of
Sinaloa, which is one of Mexico's
most violent regions. ... "This case represents yet another blow to press
freedom in Mexico, a
country that has been ravaged by violence and impunity for several years
now," said Vanessa Garnica, IPI's press freedom adviser for Latin America
and the Caribbean. (the culture that they want
to bring here. Bet on increasing murder rates. Buy a gun. ~Bob)

Excerpt: Bay Area billionaire Tom Steyer poured more than
$65 million into the midterm elections in an attempt to make climate change a
top tier issue for voters -- and lay the groundwork for an expanded effort in
2016. But with Republicans trouncing Democrats in races across the nation and
gaining control of the Senate, the environment appears to have lost big, and
some political experts say Steyer just wasted a fabulous amount of his personal
fortune. (Isn't burning money bad for global warming? ~Bob)

Excerpt: Approving the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline,
handcuffing regulations to curb greenhouse gas emissions, removing restrictions
for building pipelines and speeding up permissions to drill and export fossil
fuels will top a GOP agenda with Republicans in control of the Senate. The GOP
caucus in the upper chamber will seek to be more reserved than its House
counterpart, but Republicans in both houses will pursue the same agenda.

Excerpt: President Obama said Wednesday that he will ask
Congress for new authority to combat the Islamic State, replacing the
administration’s reliance on laws passed more than a decade ago to justify its
current military operations against the militants in Syria
and Iraq.
(The Midterms made him notice Congress. ~Bob)

Excerpt: A wanted al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula leader
who was involved in last year's plot that forced the US
to close more than a dozen diplomatic facilities across the world has been
killed in the yesterday's US
drone strike in central Yemen.
AQAP's emir for the central province
of Baydah, where the
jihadist group is battling encroaching Houthi rebels, was also killed in the
same airstrike.

Excerpt: Mortar bombs slammed into a school Wednesday in a
rebel-held suburb east of Damascus, killing at
least 13 children, activists said, as the army retook two Homs gas fields from ISIS.
Syrian children often have been the victims of the country’s civil war, now in
its fourth year, but they rarely are specifically targeted. Still, Wednesday’s
attack in the town of Qaboun marked the most
serious violence against Syrian minor-s since a twin suicide bombing killed at
least 25 children in a government-controlled neighborhood in the central city
of Homs in October. (as I've said
about a hundred times, there are no good guys in Syria. ~Bob)

Excerpt: A judge has since granted a temporary forced
marriage protection order, banning the parents from leaving Britain, after the
local authority in Croydon, London, said it 'did not trust them an inch' and
feared younger children in the family would be spirited out of England if they
were able to leave. The girl, known as S, claims she suffered repeated violence
at the hands of her parents and grandmother as a teenager and was told she
would be killed if she refused to marry abroad as this would 'bring dishonour
on the family.

Excerpt: “One should remember that enslaving the families of
the kuffar — the infidels — and taking their women as concubines is a
firmly established aspect of the Shariah, or Islamic law.” Indeed so: “When a
child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture,
and the woman’s previous marriage is immediately annulled.” (Umdat
al-SalikO9.13). (Special two-for-price-of-one sale to honor Imam John Kerry's
"Real Islam." ~Bob)

Excerpt: This shocking development shows that the insurgents
are in total control of the town, which they recaptured last week from the
Nigerian troops. ... Surprisingly, the sect on Monday announced the
introduction of Sharia and the amputation of 10 people in the town, the second
largest in the state.

Excerpt: The Iranian government-- which punishes
homosexuality by death-- accepts the existence of transgendered individuals.
The Ayatollah's fatwa allowing gender reassignment surgery has led to immense
pressure-- and sometimes full enforcement-- on cisgender homosexual men and
women to undergo these dangerous surgeries.

Excerpt: The perils of multiculturalism and open borders
have reached critical mass in Sweden.
There are Muslim enclaves where postal, fire and other essential services —
even police officers themselves —require police protection.

A police report released last month identifies 55 of these
"no-go zones" in Sweden.
These zones are similar to others that have popped up in Europe
in recent years. They formed as large Muslim populations emigrating to
politically correct and tolerant European states refuse to assimilate and set
up virtual states within a state where the authorities fear to tread. (This is
what comes of Political Correctness taken all the way into blind stupidity and
cowardice. If the Swedish authorities had come down on the Muslim extremists
when the nonsense started about controlling their local areas to the exclusion
of the legitimate Swedish government and its agencies, they could have avoided
this. And if they had tightened up on immigration as soon as the problems of
"multiculturalism" showed themselves, over ten years ago, the
problems would also have been minimized. But they could not do any of that
because of the ultra-liberal beliefs and policies of the ruling class, that
dictated against recognizing the problems as they began to show themselves. To
this day they will not identify the background of rapists, because to do so
would reveal the huge majority of rapes are by young Muslim men, who are not
apologetic when caught, because those women "were asking for it" by
the way they dressed. And PC thought says you cannot acknowledge that a
particular cultural group is the main part of the problem. So now they have
lost control entirely of 55 zones (remember, Sweden is a small country!) and the
police are no longer even trying to go in there. And the locals have
checkpoints to bar anyone entering they don't approve of. What should happen is
the government should pass some laws quickly about civil disobedience and
hooliganism, and sweep up everyone at any such checkpoints, and put them in
jail on an island, and not with nice cells with TVs and wifi. And if necessary,
call in the military to start doing sweeps through the "no go" zones,
with police, and arrest anyone who gets in the way. And then exports them right
back to where they came from. Coming down very hard and thoroughly on these
maniacs who are worse than the dog who bites the hand that feeds them is what
Swedish society needs to do to defend itself. But they won't do that, and
of course that only means it'll just get worse and worse. Meanwhile, a serious
fraction of these immigrants are living wholly on the wonderful welfare
programs of Sweden,
which makes it all even more ridiculous. Working Swedes are paying to support
nicely the people who will not recognize the government that gets them these
benefits. We may see some kind of real disaster overtake Sweden in the next 20
years, as the fires they have allowed to start burning of hostile foreign
settlements in their midst just get bigger and bigger. And they have no one to
blame but their own empty-headed governments they elected. --Del)

AL: Voters in This State Overwhelmingly Pass Amendment to Ban
Sharia Law, Other ‘Foreign Laws’ — Here Are the Details. By Jason Howerton

Excerpt: By an overwhelming 72-28 margin, voters in Alabama voted on Tuesday
to ban Sharia law and other “foreign laws” in the state’s courts. The state
constitutional amendment was criticized as an attack on Muslims by some Islamic
groups. (Dame racists are against child marriage, polygamy, stoning adulterers,
executing gays, killing apostates and the other enlightened provision of
Shari'a Law. ~Bob)

As End
Looms, US Warns Afghan Troops Taking ‘Unsustainable’ Casualties

Excerpt: This past year has been shaky for Afghanistan.
The massive NATO drawdown is well under way. Former President Hamid
Karzai is out and a new president now shares the spotlight in Kabul along with his election rival. But the
greatest and most telling development this year could be the unprecedented
scale of casualties that Afghan army and police are taking as they transition
from “in the lead to full responsibility” for Afghanistan’s security in 2015.
It’s the sort of pressure on the force that a top U.S. general in Afghanistan flagged Wednesday
as “unsustainable.”

Ignoring
Anti-Semitism in the Name of Palestinian Solidarity at UC Davis. By Richard L.
Cravatts, PhD,

Excerpt: Since its founding in 2001, the radical campus
group Students for Justice in Palestine has had
as its mission to demonize Israel
and promote a campaign to accuse the Jewish state of apartheid, racism, brutal
occupation, and crimes against humanity, among other accusations. Its radical
behavior has created a toxic atmosphere on campuses where its programs and
events have regularly morphed into what has been categorized as being
anti-Semitic in nature. Now, apparently in an effort to bring that same vituperative
ideology to the faculty, a group on the UC Davis campus calling itself Faculty
for Justice in Palestine
recently decried a letter sent to the UC Davis administration by the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) which warned that:

*****

Robert A. Hall is a Marine Vietnam Veteran who served five
terms in the Massachusetts State Senate. He is the author of The Coming Collapse of the American Republic.
http://tiny.cc/g02s4 For a free PDF of Collapse, e-mail him at tartanmarine(at)gmail.com.
Hall’s eleven books are listed here: http://tinyurl.com/o4nu65u.
His blog of political news and conservative comment is www.tartanmarine.blogspot.com.